Across the Atlantic Ocean, several members of the European Union are experiencing an economic catastrophe that is, for them, on scale with what the United States went through during the Great Depression. To illustrate the depth of the pain using two examples, the unemployment rate in both Spain and Greece now stands at 27.2%.
I’m going to walk you through how I’d save money if I were a typical 25 year old with a spouse and one kid on a $40,000 salary.
This mail bag question is a tough one about the conflict between two competing freedoms when dealing with public accommodation laws. Thanks for sending it in, I enjoyed thinking about it during an ice cream break at the office today. It was a fun distraction. (But not nearly as fun as calculating the 25 year…
In honor of the new energy portfolio I’m setting up for my family, I thought I’d do a 25 year case study of an investment in Chevron common stock. The point is to illustrate how the biggest, most boring companies on the planet are not, in fact, so boring when you look at the remarkable…
While I’ve been working the past week or so, I’ve wanted some background noise so I loaded Netflix and began watching the 5th season of Mad Men, which I hadn’t started, yet. I forgot how much I truly hate Don Draper. I feel … contempt. I loathe – that’s a rare sentiment for me but accurate, loathe – everything about him; how he treats people, how he betrays, without knowledge or consent, the women to whom he has made a commitment and whom love him, how he refuses to open himself up to others about his past or live in any sort of authentic or honest way with his family.
I found a replica Total SA oil truck for the collection, which I am planning on keeping in my home study for the new, personal energy portfolio I’ve setup for my family over the next 25+ years. It’s on its way from Germany. It is a 1:43 model, not the usual 1:64 model that is more popular in the United States, but that’s just a cultural difference.
The weather has finally turned nice in the Kansas City region so my day was spent in the landscaping section of several home improvement stores, picking up entire trees, flowers, garden supplies, and landscaping features. We ended up going everywhere from Lowe’s to local businesses to find what we wanted. I’m exhausted, and can hardly…
I believe in wild, autonomous levels of individual freedom. Provided you aren’t harming anyone, neither your neighbors nor the government have the moral authority to prevent you from seeking your own happiness. It is immoral for parents to force their children into marriages, as still goes on in parts of the world. It is immoral…
One of the tricks I use to think of the stocks I hold as real businesses, just like the operating companies we own, is to get a physical representation of the firm, putting it in an investment cabinet. Now that I am building a 25-year energy portfolio as a personal side project for my household, I already have replica die cast oil tankers on their way from retailers and eBay. I’m having a hard time finding a comparable quality Total SA tanker, if they are even manufactured.
One of the ways I manage my life is to sit in a room several times a year, staring off into the distance, and trying to imagine 5, 10, 15, 20, 30+ years in the future. I ask myself what things I wish I had done when I was younger, what things I would have wanted to avoid, what risks I would have wanted to take, and what experiences I would have wanted to have. A topic that has come up several times during these exercises is the concept of energy assets. A portfolio of energy assets is fundamentally different in nature than almost any other security, business, or holding.